Micro-farms are popular around the country and they’re tailor made for North East. With the recent notice from Refresco that they would not be buying the grapes from many local vineyards, micro-farms offer a real chance to make high profits on a small plot of agricultural land.
Jean-Martin Fortier has a 1.5 acre vegetable farm in Quebec and he has been earning a six figure income per acre for years. Could the methods here be scaled up to earn more? If you’re a grape farmer facing a financial loss this is worth taking a serious look. Even if you’ve never thought of yourself as a farmer, this could make all the difference between just getting by and doing very well. Fortier even wrote a book, The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-scale Organic Farming to teach others how to do what he’s done.
There’s a catch
Before you ask, “what’s the catch?” you might be able to figure it out on your own, it’s hard work. Ask any farmer and he’ll tell you farming isn’t easy, but many farmers and would-be farmers aren’t afraid of working, they just need a blueprint that gives them a fighting chance to make it all pay off. This might be it.
With a lot of grape farms facing no market for their grapes, why not turn a portion of their land into a micro-farm? Since many (all?) of the North East farms are in agricultural preservation areas, the land must be used for agriculture, so what is there to lose? The kinds of crops these micro-farms would grow don’t need years of growth before their first harvest, so even if it doesn’t turn into a long term solution, it offers something that could be done right away while planning for a long term switch to some other crop(s).
Perhaps a grape farmer could sub-lease a portion of their land to an individual or group who want to try this micro-farm method as a way to produce an income. The region has thousands of acres of grapes affected by the lack of a market. It seems to me, trying this on a small portion of that land would make a lot of sense.
I’m not a grape farmer, but this sounds like a great opportunity and just one way to do something right away instead of worrying, wondering and waiting for a government program to save the day. Sure, keep working to find other markets for the grapes, but why not find some other do-it-yourself solutions in the meantime?
Source: Modern Farmer
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